Jon Bell, a designer who previously worked on Twitter’s anti-abuse team, says it would be a mistake to weaken Twitter’s moderation. Outsiders, including Bell before joining the company, often don’t realize how much work it takes to keep the site from being overrun with toxic content, he says. While Twitter has been criticized for not doing enough to curb abuse and harassment, it has developed tools and processes that significantly reduce volume, Bell says. “Anything Musk is talking about would undo that.”
In 2016, Twitter founded a board of independent organizations to provide advice on online safety. Alex Holmes, deputy CEO of the British non-profit Diana Award, which is a member of the board, says he is now unsure how that work can continue. “It is understandable that there are concerns about how this could be possible if freedom of expression is prioritized to a disadvantageous degree,” he says. Holmes says he has heard similar concerns from Twitter employees.
Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO and president of GLAAD, a nonprofit that promotes LGBTQ rights and also serves on Twitter’s advisory board, tweeted monday that Musk’s property made her “nervous about the online safety of the LGBTQ community.”
To believe Musk would stand up for women and others targeted by the platform would be “foolish,” said Brianna Wu, a game developer and software engineer who was in touch with the Trust and Safety team at the time until 2020. Twitter, after being known as Gamergate during the campaign of online harassment in 2014. “He’s a billionaire version of the alt-right troll.”
After Twitter took action against her trolls, Wu continued to document harassment on the platform, particularly against women and members of marginalized communities, to share with Twitter.
Wu said she never felt that Twitter’s Trust and Safety team made decisions driven by politics, a claim made by some of his critics on the platform. “They had a version of their product that was bad for users, and in good faith they were trying to figure out how to make it better,” Wu says.
By taking the company private, Musk would also eliminate the responsibility that a board of directors and shareholders can place on a publicly traded company. Activist investors have previously filed resolutions to try to push Twitter and other social media companies toward goals such as more robust moderation policies and more environmentally friendly operations.
Andrew Behar, CEO of the nonprofit As You Sow, which represents a group of activist Twitter shareholders, says Twitter under Musk will likely be a lot like Meta (formerly Facebook) under Mark Zuckerberg.
“You have one person responsible. Mark Zuckerberg makes all the decisions. Whatever resolution you submit, it will have a 10-to-1 voting preference,” says Behar. “There is a lot of danger when you have all that power isolated in one person like Zuckerberg. We have that now with Twitter.”
Natasha Lamb, managing partner at Arjuna Capital, a boutique investment firm that owns Twitter stock, says she’s concerned that even if Musk owns Twitter, it won’t have his full attention. “Twitter is too important to be a hobby,” she says.
Lamb said Arjuna is unlikely to vote for the purchase. “I think he’s a brilliant engineer,” she says. “I’m not sure he’s a civil rights expert. I don’t think he’s an expert on free speech.”
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